Open Dental Forum

Have any of the developers profiled Open Dental to see where the common bottlenecks are, with day to day usage?

I'm designing a setup for my office, and trying to minimize these bottlenecks. I recognize that the heavy lifting is being done by the MySQL database, so a DB intensive setup would be the best (right)? I'm trying to spec out a rack-mount server with sufficient computing capacity and storage capacity to last 3 to 5 years. My initial thought was to go to SSDs with hardware Raid 1+0. I was planning on running Linux on the server, with MySQL on that server either in a VM or directly on bare metal. The windows shares were going to be provided via Samba. All the clients are going to run Win 8.1 (if I can get it integrated).

Any thoughts are appreciated.

Thanks,

Danish Qadri, DMD

Are you planning on having a typical installation of Open Dental or are you doing other things like replication, middle tier, etc.?

I have 3 ops now, moving to 6 ops, so nothing too fancy, likely very typical. What exactly do you mean by middle tier? For Replication, that would be handled by the Mysql DB engine?

dqadri wrote:I have 3 ops now, moving to 6 ops, so nothing too fancy, likely very typical.

You should be fine then. MySQL will be the bottle neck but it isn't MySQL's failure, it's usually the result of a poorly written query. And poorly is a harsh word to use, it's really due to the fact that we just haven't stumbled upon something before. E.g. someone has a 3 gig employee table. That would cause many of our queries to run slowly because they are written with the little thought towards optimizing speed because the table typically never exceeds a few hundred KBs.

dqadri wrote:What exactly do you mean by middle tier?

http://opendental.com/manual/middletier.html

dqadri wrote: For Replication, that would be handled by the Mysql DB engine?

Yes but you have to set things up within Open Dental for it to work correctly. Mainly things like random primary keys (which can cause slowness depending on how large the key ranges are).
http://opendental.com/manual/replication.html

You don't have to overdue your server. It runs lightning fast in our office for the past few years on a Phenom II x6 1090T as my server server on a built in MB RAID 1 setup using 7200 drives. In other words I don't think you need a typical xenon 8 core or dual xenon system, OD is not power hungry. Just get something stable and good.

I recently moved it to use SSD drives for the system and mysql files and kept my large data shares on the 7200 hard drives to help access times on mysql and I do notice a good difference in speed.

We have 8 ops, 24 or so computers on the network, setup with ubuntu linux and automysqlbackup.sh.2.5 script, and rsync of data every 15 minutes local and daily offsite to my home. Works great.

How large would you say your A to Z folders are? I'm trying to get an idea of network bandwidth for Open Dental as well as the digital x-rays.

Would you remember how much your server cost you when you built it? How old would it be now? Is it a tower or rack-setup?

Thanks,

Danish
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dqadri wrote:How large would you say your A to Z folders are?

Here's a good thread to get an idea on that question: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=5426

jsalmon wrote:

dqadri wrote:How large would you say your A to Z folders are?

Here's a good thread to get an idea on that question: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=5426

LOL, I started that thread, thanks. I never really got a straight response. I'm thinking 1TB would hold me over for several years, no?

- Dansih

I thought maybe you overlooked this response on that thread because I thought it was spot on with how hard of a question it really is:

Hersheydmd wrote:That is an impossible question. Depends on the size of your practice, how many providers, how many patients per week. Curious about the number of files you are adding each month to add up to 1.5 - 2 GB.
My Dexis data folder is 7.3 GB (65,600 files) in 10 yrs. Dexis does an excellent job of compressing files.
The rest of my data partition is another 33 GB (57,000 files) including my A-Z folder which is very small (4.5 yrs). We are paperless and scan everything with Paperport - B&W, 200 dpi so we get pretty small file sizes.
I am about to swap my 250 GB drives for 1 TB drives, that should hold me for a very long time.

Long story short, 1TB is more than enough for Open Dental's AtoZfolder for typical use.